OUR JOURNEY THROUGH XBOX 360 GAMES THAT DESTROYED THEIR DEVELOPMENT STUDIOS CONTINUES

True of all of these games, which is why I'm playing them

It was a super interesting period of dev trying really cool ideas, but spending more money on them than subsequent sales could actually support

Interesting and flawed is so much more compelling than safe and successful

I was actually super hyped for this game before it came out, bc deviantart was still relevant in 2009 and one of my fav concept artists at the time was working on it:

Never actually played it though bc when it came out I had very little money and reviews said it was bad

I have since learned that
- reviews are always wrong
- poorly-reviewed games are really cheap if you wait nine years before buying them

I haven't started playing yet because look how sick this menu system is

That's probably the best solution I've ever seen for controlling a slider widget with a joystick?

STEVE BLUM GRAVEL VOICE HECK YEAHHHH

wilhelm scream in opening cutscene

I shot the first enemy without being seen

The protagonist excitedly shouted "NAILED YA!!!"

I... guess that's the tone this game is going with?

There's an always-on handheld shaky-cam effect, separate X and Y sensitivity on the right stick, extremely aggressive camera acceleration, a field of view of like MAYBE 60 degrees, and an auto-DoF effect that constantly picks the wrong depth and blurs everything you're looking at

I forgot 2009 was PEAK motion sickness

there's a whole tutorial for punching physics objects into people

this is extremely promising

Terrorist organization covered this entire city in floating electric mines on the off-chance that the one dude in the world who gets around via a metal grappling-hook arm happens to show up

ohhhh man remember this thing?

why did so many games from this era have a Look At The Cutscene Button

Like I get the use for it if you're doing a Half Life style "camera never leaves the player's head" thing and don't have the time/skill to do HL's hyper-intensive sightline-control-via-level-design thing

but most of these games ALSO had actual cutscenes

Like presumably the idea is that animations call attention to changes in paths/objectives. So like if a building collapses and opens the way forward, you don't want the player staring at a wall while that happens

but it... doesn't work?

like if the player doesn't notice a giant screen-filling environment animation they're ALSO not gonna notice a teeny button prompt labeled X LOOK that pops up for three seconds

Zelda solved this in 1997: Lock the camera, show the thing, then pull the camera back to the player so they know their location relative to the thing

The look button is such a janky solution to a problem that you should never have had in the first place

(Bulletstorm gets a pass because they realized it was ridiculous and just leaned into it. You get *points* based on how fast you react to the Look prompt lol)

This game's movement is extremely screwy and extremely fun

The grappling hook physics are.... really not physics at all, but if you can figure out the game's goofy logic it feels pretty consistent

It definitely understands that movement is the fun part of the game

So far the only really *bad* bit is that they decided the best way to limit the play area to a level that fits in memory is to surround everything with INVISIBLE KILL VOLUMES

every time you try to get some cool spiderman momentum going and explore the level you just... die

also since that didn't suck enough it only saves checkpoints like every ten minutes or so

lmao videogames

I wonder how many times Steve Blum has had to say the word "coordinates"

Do you think Steve Blum even thinks about lines like this any more or is he just like "yep videogames"

Bionic Commando is pretty fun but consider: Bionicle Commando

Movement and combat are both extremely fun and the level design is just.... not at all up to the task of supporting them

YOU CAN JUST THROW DUDES AT OTHER DUDES AND IT DOES WAY MORE DAMAGE THAN GUNS

lmao this is very clearly a "We were gonna do a totally awesome gross transformation sequence but ran out of time/money" cutscene

games are often full of weird moments where something was very obviously planned but then cut, and I always wonder if people who aren't devs notice most of them

I mentioned this in a different thread but, the sad thing about Bionic Commando is GRIN probably could have survived the game's commercial failure if Square hadn't screwed them over

Square wanted a western-developed Final Fantasy game, contracted GRIN to develop it, and then refused to pay them for months and then bailed, leaving the studio with basically zero money

gamedev, man

I'm actually curious how many indies around my age started making their own games instead of trying to join a studio specifically *because* we watched the entire mid-budget studio niche collapse in the late 2000s

It's a large part of how I ended up working on Aerobat

Like everybody fights over the definition of "indie" now but in ~2008 "NO PUBLISHER" was a pretty major criterion, specifically because of stuff like this (and EA Spouse a few years earlier)

Back on topic:

They did a Plot Reveal and fridged the only two female characters, separately, within 30 seconds of each other

oh that was the end lol

protag's wife died and the other female character died so he got mad and punched steve blum the end

Bionic Commando's good

Can def see why it didn't sell enough to keep a studio alive, but it's not a bad game. Plenty of flaws, mostly in level design and some really dull bosses, but combat and grapple movement are super fun and creative

20/20 hindsight and all but you can def see how the economics of the 360 gen killed it

Could easily have been a successful PS2 game, but in 2009 you needed full voice acting and mocapped cutscenes and destruction physics and sculpted normal maps and detailed city levels and and

If they'd cut the AAA Cinematic Experience cruft and just focused and polished the good parts we'd have Grappling Hook Tony Hawk with Guns, which would be a way better game AND much cheaper to make

The AAA bloat just seemed like a requirement rather than bloat at the time though

I think one aspect of genuine advancement we've seen over the last decade is devs leaving the cinematic themepark stuff to the publisher-owned infinibudget studios, while everyone else has gotten really good at scoping down to the parts of their games that really matter